How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

  Miller was more experienced and at one remove from the still-evolving and frenetic culture of dance music. As he surveyed the fly-by-night deals and fractious relationships between the parties involved, he began to understand that the relationships between Mute, Rhythm King and Warp were no longer practicable. ‘We did very well for an eighteen-month period. We had no. 1 singles, but it was very pressured,’ he says. ‘One of the parts that got unravelled was Warp, and I regret that massively, of course.’

  Beckett and Mitchell asked Miller to intervene and help them extricate Warp from the Rhythm King deal. Miller, displaying his ability to retain perspective amid the chaos and recrimination of fast money and chart success, agreed to facilitate Warp’s departure. ‘We were having secret conversations with Daniel, trying to get out,’ says Beckett. ‘We’d meet in the cafe nearby and he just said, “Oh God, not another one.” I’ve got so much respect for him. He was the one drilling it into our heads to get the international side together, saying, “Look, every label’s hot for a while, then they go cool in a year or two. Don’t just rely on the hacks in the UK, get all your international things set up.”’

  Rhythm King proved a salutary experience for the partners in Warp. They had registered incredible sales through word of mouth and some night-time plays on John Peel alone, but none of the profits had made it back to Sheffield. Once Beckett and Mitchell recovered control of the label, they resisted any further offers from interested parties and insisted on remaining independent.

  On Miller’s advice they started to develop a catalogue distinct from the hot-for-a-week turnover of hardcore singles. In a display of their A&R instinct that would become one of the label’s hallmarks, Warp released the first album by a British techno artist, Frequencies by LFO, in 1991. ‘Frequencies was the first album we did,’ says Beckett. ‘It pulled us out of the trough, where we were just completely skint with no royalties, and it was the point where we turned ourselves into a record label. We really started clocking that that was the way to have a bit of longevity and build artists.’

  Frequencies had the added significance of being one of the first Warp releases to feature artwork by the studio The Designers Republic, the company that had devised the label’s distinctive retro-futurist logo and developed Warp’s relationship with the colour purple. The Designers Republic was run by Ian Anderson, who had met Beckett and Mitchell before Warp had started, a fellow veteran of the FON era. The Designers Republic, or tDR as it became known, specialised in playful appropriations of signifiers from the world of conglomerates and multinationals. The graphic language of branding was subverted to provide a commentary on lifestyle consumerism. It was a technique The Designers Republic used to great effect for Warp, one which saw the two Sheffield creative companies project the image of management-class global reach. ‘We had a massive corporate logo that made us look like we were a twenty-storey company,’ says Beckett, ‘whereas we were actually just operating out of a bedroom, trying to use our artwork and our imagery to make us look way bigger than we actually were.’

  The Designers Republic was a reference to Sheffield’s nickname as The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, which in a typical gesture of regional pride and adept branding, tDR renamed SoYo. The wit and energy of the design studio met the rhythms and textures released on the disc.

  Warp dealt in predominantly instrumental music, or as its detractors in the weekly music press called it, ‘faceless techno bollocks’. It was the very facelessness of its artists that allowed tDR to develop a relationship with the label as rich as that of Oliver and Watts-Russell’s at 4AD or Saville and Wilson’s at Factory. Beckett’s description of tDR’s work for Warp could equally apply to the two other labels. ‘You’re not quite sure what is going on inside the sleeve,’ he says, ‘but the artwork’s so confident that it doesn’t need to market what’s going in there.’

  Warp’s next release was as much a product of their environment as their first run of singles had been – capturing the experience of the post-rave afterhours early morning slowdown, rather than the hardcore rush and pumped energy of its dance floor. Beckett and Mitchell decided to compile the more obtuse and languorous tracks that were often found on techno artists’ 12-inch B-sides or experimental releases and present them as a contemplative listening experience.

  ‘We were hearing those tracks when we were going back to people’s houses,’ says Beckett. ‘People were picking out these weird B-sides and you’re there off your head either on acid or E and just hearing them and going, “This is fucking incredible, this music,” and then realising that that stuff wasn’t selling. There’d be a few people interested but most people would go, “I can’t play this out.” So it was realising that there was nothing wrong with the music. It was just the format that it was being put on.’

  The format Warp developed was a series called Artificial Intelligence. The first AI release was a compilation of the tracks that had caught Beckett and Mitchell’s attention. The following year artists on the compilation released stand-alone albums in the series, Black Dog Production’s Bytes and Fuse’s Dimension Intrusion being two of the highlights. The label was now moving into more established record company practice. The AI series, with its signature Designers Republic artwork and considered track listing, set Warp apart from their dance and rave contemporaries, placing the label in a more curatorial context. For a label that placed great emphasis on the future, Artificial Intelligence made surprisingly overt references to the past. The gatefold sleeve of Artificial Intelligence volume 1 featured a reclining android blowing blue smoke rings; around his feet were tried and tested classics for the psychedelic armchair traveller: Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. The idea was rejected by the hardcore community which saw the move as a backwards step into prog rock, headphone-obsessive behaviour.

  ‘People were like, “You can’t do a fucking album of this,” but once it was out people just started raving about it. I realised that was a real changing point for the label because it was a point where your records and your sales were being governed more about what the media were saying, and making that step into the public knowing about it via the media, whereas before it had been very direct: it was nothing to do with the media, it was just like people in the clubs heard it and they went out and tried to buy what they’d heard the next week.’

  Warp was building an international reputation and releasing music by artists from outside the UK. The company was still defined by Sheffield. It was run out of a city-centre shop during office hours and released records that soundtracked the city’s nightlife and its early morning reveries. It was an experience of the city shared by Pulp, one of Sheffield’s longest-running bands, who had been signed to Fire, only to see their releases stall. While their relationship with their record company floundered, the band had enjoyed the renaissance of Sheffield as a music city. Jarvis Cocker had directed a video for Sweet Exorcist’s ‘Testone’ and the band rehearsed and recorded in the FON complex where Cocker had also once lived.

  ‘We’d all been knocking around for years before the label,’ says Beckett, who, with Mitchell, was approached about releasing some Pulp music, while the band were renegotiating with Fire.

  At Fire Dave Bedford had been attempting to rekindle the relationship between Pulp and the label but to little avail. The hidden complexities of the band’s contract had meant Pulp had left on bad terms, only to return with a new album that bore the influence of Sheffield after dark. ‘It’s a moment that I still can’t get my head round,’ says Bedford. ‘Clive let them go. We’d put an album out. We’d recorded another album. Pulp had discovered drum machines and dance music and Clive was scratching his head. I was trying to get the record out and Clive let them go. And then two years later they came trotting back, nothing had happened and Clive said, “Yeah, we’ll re-sign you.” So we re-signed them.’ The resulting album, Separations, had been recorded in 1989 at the height of Sheffield hardcore but wasn’t released until 1991.


  ‘At the time we were really frustrated,’ says Bedford. ‘It was just before they were able to get on to radio. We were at that stage, radio were just looking at us like we’re mad. We’d get press and nothing else.’

  Pulp were now in the invidious and momentum-sapping position of having had two releases hamstrung by Fire. Through a variety of legal contortions they signed to Island Records in a deal that, by Fire’s standards, was healthily remunerative; there was a hidden cost, however. Clive Solomon had negotiated himself a percentage of their future earnings in exchange for releasing them from their contract. ‘They went storming off and did the deal, and it cost them,’ says Bedford. ‘Clive got an override on all the big records – for doing nothing. Pulp leaving was probably the final straw for me. We’d lost the Lemonheads, the Blue Aeroplanes, Teenage Fanclub, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized.’

  In between the negotiations Pulp released two singles and some of the most innovative music of their career on Gift, an imprint which Beckett and Mitchell set up within Warp for the purpose of helping Pulp. ‘Now we could just do it on the same label,’ says Beckett ‘but at the time there was no way we could, ’cause it was so different musically that people would just go, “What the hell are you doing?” I mean, they still do in a way, but at that time you couldn’t even comprehend doing it on the same label.’

  The Gift material that Pulp recorded was among their strongest. The track ‘Sheffield Sex City’, an erotic travelogue that was richly evocative of the dole-bohemia of their home town, was a stand-out. With its fusion of sequencers, Sheffield place names and disorientation, the song is a daylight companion to Warp’s early releases –a bus ride across the city, soundtracked by the pulse and bleeps of the warehouse dance floor still ringing in the ears from the night before.

  Pulp were not the only veterans of the independent sector to be included in Britpop. The Auteurs were led by Luke Haines whose previous band, the Servants, had also been on Fire, where they had been handled by Dave Barker. ‘The drummer in the Servants was the guy who was in the Housemartins – the one who got done for axing his neighbour,’ says Barker. ‘He was a bit eccentric. I’m not kidding. He had fifteen toothbrushes, like in the room, you know … in the room, all the toothbrushes. “What’ve you got all them for?” … “Well, I like to choose …”’

  The Auteurs were one of the first signings to Hut Recordings, a new imprint of Virgin, a company that was by 1992 a wholly owned subsidiary of EMI. At the turn of the decade several imprints were launched by the majors, either as boutique labels within the company, equipped with a small staff and a budget to sign new talent, or, as a front-of-house for a newly signed band to retain their sense of individuality. All were, initially at least, distributed independently, usually by RTM – Rough Trade Marketing, the new company started from the ashes of Rough Trade. RTM was a far more efficient and market-attuned organisation than the one from which it derived its name. RTM distributed the major labels’ releases and in doing so gave the acts the protective veneer of integrity and, more importantly, a presence in the higher reaches of the indie charts. In return the majors provided RTM with a much-needed income stream. ‘It was very modern. It was much more of a business,’ says Mark Mitchell, one of the new intake of staff at RTM. ‘I heard about the old Rough Trade and it was a completely different company. There were very clear lines of division. Of all the Rough Trade old guard, there was barely a handful in sight.’

  Within the industry, imprints like Hut – major-funded labels created in the image and vernacular of Creation or Fire – were given the rather clumsy nick name ‘mandies’. By the early Nineties their marketing-led approach was starting to gain traction, filling the gap in the market left by the closure of Rough Trade. Telling the difference between an independent release and the new signing on Hut was of little interest to the average reader of the music press; it was also increasingly difficult, as labels like Hut and Dedicated signed bands that would have previously gravitated to Rough Trade or Creation.

  To veterans of independence like Barker there was one crucial factor which separated the mandies from the indies: money. ‘There were some labels that were all funded up,’ he says. ‘The first few releases by Hut had like half-page ads in the NME and no little label can do that. This was like the first release by Revolver or one of these bands, and it’s like a half-page advert. You could put it down to when Rough Trade went: really, that was a big moment.’

  Hut was run by Dave Boyd, a former label manager at Rough Trade who successfully replicated the outward appearance of an indie within the context of a major. ‘It started out to give the illusion of an indie,’ says Barker. ‘Let’s put it in some funky area, down the old Portobello Road, rent some office space, but we’ll get the most expensive people in the West End to do the fuckin’ radio, this other guy’s gonna do the press, and all this caper.’

  Hut was soon taken in-house within the Virgin complex, but a sticker bearing the legend ‘Corporate Rock Sucks’ was displayed on its door. It was indicative of the growing meaninglessness of the word ‘indie’. Corporate rock sucked, even within the corporation.

  ‘I genuinely don’t think that many majors who set up those mandies knew why,’ says Mitchell. ‘They just knew that the A&R and the bands wanted it that way, so they did the deal and they tried it out. I think your average boss of those majors was sitting there going, “How come, when we sign a new act, no one takes it seriously, but all those fucking indies with no marketing budgets – they just fucking walk on to the NME? If you’re a major what have you got to lose? None of these records are going to sell an amount that makes any difference and, even if they did, most of them had deals where, after any hint of sales, they went in-house anyway.’

  Pulp signed to Island, a label that had known about the difficult realities of remaining independent more than any other. After thirty years of trying to keep his head above water, while assembling a peerless catalogue of music, Chris Blackwell finally sold Island to the Polygram Group in 1989. Cally Calloman was on the staff at Island, where he encountered a different culture to any he had experienced while working at the other majors. ‘Meeting and working with Chris Blackwell, I realised how Island had gone right up to about the mid-Eighties with a huge amount of difficulty,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Chris ever enjoyed it, because they were always on the point of bankruptcy and collapse. He would be seeing at the same time a no. 1 single all over the world with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and then the bank manager phoning up and saying, “Unless you pay off this x-million debt by the end of the week, we’re going to wind you up.”’

  Island was no longer in a perpetual fire-fight with its creditors, but the market realities of being part of a multinational meant that the year to year profit-and-loss sheets were not driving the company’s finances any more. Island was part of the Polygram Group and consequently beholden to the stock market. ‘It’s a shareholder thing,’ says Calloman. ‘Once you get shareholders involved that are demanding an extra 10 per cent every year on their profit returns, the pressure is handed down through the executives, who are all on bonus schemes. This is very boring for people who like music, but it is one of the reasons why a lot of record companies have foundered by the wayside. Because music is not cars, it’s not widgets, it’s an ethereal magical thing. Discovering Pulp, a band that had been going for fourteen years and just happened to be reaching that point where it would really work, it’s really ethereal. You can’t then just go out and do it.’

  When Pulp were at no. 2 in the charts with ‘Common People’ in 1995, the shift the mandies had started, towards the majors signing and marketing guitar music, had turned into the short-lived but runaway commercial success of Britpop. Bands that might have been expected to sell 30,000 copies were suddenly, via the relentless process of finely tuned marketing, outselling The Smiths. The careers of Depeche Mode, New Order and The Smiths were part of the ecology of their record companies. The relationships between Sleeper, the Bluetones and Cast and
their respective labels were altogether less refined. As far as their product mangers were concerned, they were that quarter’s product, a new release before the fourth quarter’s schedule of Greatest Hits compilations. ‘The problem with the majors is no one makes a decision,’ says Mitchell. ‘The guy who makes the decision is so far up the food chain that it’s impossible to get a yes or no out of most people, and they don’t even know why a decision’s made. Most of the people who run indies have got their heads screwed on – they’re quite logical people – whereas the majors are full of egos, and Britpop was completely untouched by the indies. It was all on majors.’

  Oasis and Blur, the two bands most associated with Britpop, had the benefit of working with record companies populated with small teams of staff, and the first-hand experience of independent labels. Blur were signed to Food, an imprint started by Bill Drummond’s former partner in Zoo, Dave Balfe. Zoo, whose motto was ‘Let Us Prey’ had been funded by EMI since 1988. By the time of the release of Parklife, and the first of the endless Britpop summers, Balfe had left Zoo. The company was run by his former co-director Andy Ross and owned outright by EMI.

  Mike Smith was a contemporary of Blur in age and had signed the band to a publishing deal while at MCA Music. He remained part of the band’s inner sanctum throughout their career, a sounding-board for their ideas and part of the hands-on team that helped differentiate the band from its contemporaries. ‘I think it was always a great bugbear of Andy Ross that he was never seen as being independent, because he was tied into EMI records,’ he says. ‘Unlike so many A&R men, who just sit there and nod and agree with bands, Food would go in and really roll their sleeves up and try and shape and influence what the band did. That doesn’t happen that much. I think there’s a very real possibility that if Blur had signed to another label they might not have succeeded like they did.’